The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (236 page)

BOOK: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics
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Rokkan , Stein
(1921–79)
Norwegian political scientist with close American connections. Known for his work in such areas as state formation, nation building,
centre-periphery politics
,
party systems
, and historical political sociology.
WG 
roll call
Roll call votes require a formal record of the presence and vote or abstention of each member of a legislature, traditionally by calling out each name, but increasingly through the use of electronic recording devices. Roll call analysis seeks to identify voting blocs within legislatures where partisanship is a poor predictor of voting behaviour.
WG 
Roman law
More commonly referred to, by lawyers, as civil law, meaning the collection of laws developed before the reformation in the sixth century by the Emperor Justinian. Today, civil law systems are prevalent in all the member states of the European Union except Ireland and the United Kingdom. European Community law is itself influenced by the civil law tradition rather than the English common law. The characteristics of Roman law, most noticeable to English lawyers, are the use of codes, which are the written formulation of legal principles. The division of laws into four parts, under codes promulgated by the Emperor Justinian in AD 528, consolidated the law.
The four parts are as follows:
(1) The Institutes setting out the basic elements of jurisprudence which appear in a didactic form.
(2) The Digest or Pandects containing various rules which are derived from the Institutes. These rules are accompanied by opinions on the law and are organized on the basis of a compendium. The Digest is composed of fifty books divided into seven parts. The Pandects also contains fifty books, each book contains several titles. Taken together, both the Digest and the Pandects are an important source of law and authority.
(3) The
Codex Justinianis
, adapted and changed since it was first devised in AD 528, was divided into twelve books; each book had several parts. The first nine books were called the
Codex
, the remaining three books contained the
Jus Publicum.
(4) The Novels (
Novellae Constitutiones
). About 168 books were placed into one volume which provided an explanation of Justinian's Codes. These were translated into various languages.
Roman law was influential in Britain for over three hundred years during the reigns of the Emperors Claudius to Honorius. However, it never took root and English law developed its own distinctiveness based on the common law rather than on the Justinian Codes.
JM 
Romanticism
Associated with free and idealistic expression of and attitudes towards the passions and individuality, Romanticism is nevertheless an extremely vague term, more familiar in analysis of the arts than of politics. In literature, the adjective ‘romantic’ first appeared in French towards the end of the seventeenth century, and referred to a form of narrative fiction, involving passions rather than reason, which eventually became known in English as the novel. Romanticism as an explicit system of ideas appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, in Germany, as a critique of neoclassical aesthetics, an aspect of Enlightenment thought. It came to include history, philosophy, music, the plastic arts, and politics, as well as literature. The meaning in politics often seems to be a reflection of literary classifications, and Romanticism cannot be associated with any specific political system or ideology. The first notable set of events to which Romanticism provided a response was the
French Revolution
. Some Romantics supported it, some opposed it, and some changed their minds about it.
Romanticism is often seen as an antithesis of the Enlightenment, but that is too simple. For the Enlightenment thinker, human nature is universal, or at least what is important about it is universal, and it can be analysed in terms of general laws on the model of physics. For the Romantic, this is impossible. What is important is the specificity and creativity of each individual, which cannot be reduced to any set of general laws. One aspect of this is the Romantic rejection of natural science, at least when applied to humanity but sometimes in any guise. Part of this denial of universalism involved the Romantic adoption of nationalism, but originally this was more cultural than political, and did not include the idea that one nation was ‘better’ than another.
Politically, Romanticism has been associated with every view from liberalism to extreme authoritarianism. One of its essential manifestations in the nineteenth century involved the rejection of individualism and industrial society in favour of sympathy for the factory worker, as in the case of
Coleridge
.
CS 
Rome, Treaty of
Treaty signed in 1957 which inaugurated the European Economic Community (EEC, later the EC and EU), establishing a common market in a variety of products between member states. The Community was seen by its signatories (the
Benelux
countries, France, West Germany, and Italy) as complementing the success of the European Coal and Steel Community, created by the same countries in 1952.
SW 

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